A man who believed himself to be Victor Von Doom awoke from dreams of pain to find himself in Latveria in the year 2099. He quickly made his way to the capital and found a new ruler, the cyborg Tiger Wylde, enthroned in his place. Wylde explained to him that he was in the year 2099 and that after his absence Latveria was left leaderless, and it was only Wylde’s intervention that saved it from being annexed by the corporations. Doom, however, was still furious and demanded that Wylde remove himself from his throne. When Wylde ignored him, they fought, but in the end Wylde’s advanced technology triumphed. Doom was defeated and Wylde pulled off his mask to reveal his face, but found that he had the unscarred visage of a young man, in spite of what history had taught about Doom. Wylde then burned Doom’s exposed face to match history’s description. Thinking him a cheap imposter, Wylde ordered his tarot card reader, Fortune, to dispose of him, and thus Doom was ejected from his own capital city.
Instead of letting Doom die, Fortune saw him as her only chance to overthrow Wylde, and so she took him back to her gypsy clan, Zefiro, Doom’s own descendants. There Doom found new allies, and together they flew to the headquarters of the Pixel corporation on the Isla Lobos de Afuera. They found a doctor there named Celia Quinones, who they persuaded to enhance Doom with nanotechnology, increasing his motor responses and neural capabilities. Combined with stolen Pixel technology that he built into a new suit of armor, the man who called himself Doctor Doom now dubbed himself, simply, Doom.
He then began his campaign to win back Latveria. Doom first stole a shipment of tritonium that was being sent to Wylde, increasing tension between Latveria and the Pixel corporation. Then he handed out food to the Latverian masses in order to earn their loyalty when the eventual overthrow happened. Finally, when Wylde came after Doom instead, he coerced him with a tritonium bomb to fight him alone, and eventually when their fight remained a standstill, Doom detonated the tritonium, bringing down a mountain upon the two of them, and then using his armor’s phase shifter, he saved himself and passed unharmed through the mountain. Latveria, again, was under the control of Doom.
Doom’s next adversary was the Pixel corporation itself, and its head, Eduardo Devargas. Devargas, uncomfortable with Doom’s rise to power and the theft of the tritonium, sent a cyberspace being known as Fever against Doom, infecting his computers and even the systems of his armor. This forced Doom to enter cyberspace with the netglider gypsy, Wire, and face Fever. The human virus attacked Doom first by sending him into a gamesim in which he fought a twisted version of the 20th Century’s Fantastic Four. Only after absorbing the info-gathering abilities of a discarded program named Paloma, was Doom able to gather enough power in cyberspace to face off against Fever directly, and finally, destroy him. In the process, Doom accidentally allowed the program Paloma to become sentient, but despite a brief struggly, they both realized that they needed each and came to a compromise. With Paloma’s help, Doom was able to take physical control of Pixel and defeat its former head, Devargas. And with Doom’s help, Paloma was able to run free in cyberspace. During this confrontation, Doom also faced a computer simulation involving a series of fictional and historical figures such as Jack the Ripper and Professor Moriarty in an attempt to regain his lost memory, but the attempt failed, leaving him more confused.
Doom later fought a pair of strange foes. First, was the resurrected patriarch of the future nation of Wakanda, a king named Thandaza, whose granddaughter, Princess Okusana, rebuilt in a cyborg body to avoid the pressures of leadership. Doom finally defeated Thandaza, returning him to a grateful death, but not before plugging in and ransacking Wakanda of its technology, including the design of their Environmental Maintenance Platforms that kept its air clean of pollutants. Next, he fought an ancient being known as Necrotek, who was once defeated by the three Eyes of Agamotto, in the hands of Caius the Spartan. With the help of the gypsy’s young adept, Vox, and his single Eye of Agamotto, Doom banished Necrotek with a Caius Circle drawn in cyberspace, where Necrotek had anchored himself, using information Doom found in a hidden library of mystical texts.
When the man-beast Ravage stole the plans from Alchemax’s floating city Valhalla, Doom appeared to him and deciphered them, finding that the thrusters were its weakness. Doom traveled to Valhalla and met up with one of Avatarr’s nano-engineered superheroes, Loki, as well as the body of Heimdall, defeated by 2099’s X-Men. Avatarr’s Thor appeared shortly later and attacked Doom, angered by Heimdall’s death. In an attempt to stop Thor, Doom overloaded the source of his power, Mjolnir, but the resulting explosion threw both combatants miles away. When Doom recovered, he returned to face Avatarr, and discovered that the flaw in the engines which would soon send the city crashing to the ground in the middle of New York was well known by Avatarr, who was oblivious to the damage it would cause. Finally, Doom teamed up with 2099’s Spider-Man, Punisher, and Ravage to bring down Valhalla. However, once it was under control, Doom appropriated the flying city and made it a new providence of Latveria.
Later, while searching for signs of the alien life that he remembered from the 20th Century, Doom stumbled across a source in Antarctica that was sending and receiving a signal from deep space. Doom traveled to Antarctica to investigate the signal and found a being called Radian who used a technology based on manipulation of light itself, who bested Doom and transported himself to the Chin Shan Space Station, where Doom’s ally Fortune was held captive by a woman named Feng Huang while Fortune was searching for her lost brother she presumed dead, along with Fortune’s guide Lei Fong, Huang’s sister. Doom downloaded some of the technology from the spherical craft that had sent the signal and followed Radian to the space station. Once there, Radian announced that he was an emissary of the alien race the Y’Lestja and the Collective, who offered human beings a place in its benevolent quest to gain all universal knowledge. The Collective then accessed the minds of Earth, pulling out all the important symbols and archetypes that gave meaning to Earth culture, and left, but first gave Radian his autonomy as a separate being. Feng Huang immediately attacked the vulnerable Radian and set her station to self-destruct. Doom then fought Feng Huang for Radian’s armor, but both failed, and Doom rocketed away from the station in an escape pod just as it exploded, falling to Earth into the Savage Land.
Doom crawled from his escape pod as his armor malfunctioned and he faced against an attacking Tyrannosaur, which he killed with his last remaining energy. Though the fight against the dinosaur exhausted the last of his armor’s reserve and it began to burn his skin, forcing Doom to remove it and finally collapse unconscious into strange dreams of a soldier’s life, leaving Doom with more questions about his true identity. The X-Men’s Bloodhawk appeared and confused him for a hunter. Angered, Bloodhawk took him to the Village of the Sky where a group led by Chalda and Carson Leibowitz, who told Doom about an Alchemax executive named Christian L’Argent who came to the Savage Land to obtain drilling rights from the local tribe, but then became obsessed with local traditions and magic. Doom led the group back to the sight of his escape pod crash to find his dropped armor, but a member of the local swamp tribe had taken it, and Doom’s group eventually tracked the armor to the tribe, but was captured by L’Argent, his men, and the swamp tribe. L’Argent appeared deranged and mutated thanks to a local herbal drug, and he decided to sacrifice Doom and his group to the gods to stop the earthquakes which were being caused by L’Argent’s own drilling. But during the ritual another earthquake interrupted L’Argent, bringing down the temple on everyone. While the rest escaped, Doom face L’Argent, who revealed to him that the world corporations were secretly controlled by a pair of shadows who manipulated them from afar, once of which was the supposed true Victor Von Doom. But before Doom could find out more, one of L’Argent’s men, an android spy, shot him. Doom killed the android in response, finding the robot technology strangely familiar.
After returning to Latveria and repairing his armor, Doom consulted Fortune who prophesized that Doom would soon face a great threat. Then Doom, filled with the dread that he was actually the mercenary soldier in his dreams, traveled to the info city Myridia, and blackmailed its leader, General Tibor Diaghilev Czerny into turning its resources over to him, making him the new head of Myridia. The General agreed, believing that Doom was actually Erik Kristofer Czerny, his lost son. But before he could find out more, a rebuilt Tiger Wylde, sent by a mysterious figure that appeared to be the real Victor Von Doom, attacked Doom. He defeated the android, but the General was killed in the process, and Doom was forced to reprogram the computers of Myridia that were hooked up to the General’s life signs, fooling them into thinking the General was still alive. Doom then traveled in the floating city Valhalla to the hidden island in the middle of the Pacific, and after finishing off Tiger Wylde, who had followed him, he finally faced the man claiming to be the true Doctor Doom. After a fight which took the combatants through a series of different time periods, Doom bested his double, discovering in the process that he was the true Doom, but his partner Margaretta Von Geisterstadt had rebuilt him using the soldier’s DNA, and stuck scattered memories of the soldier’s life in his head to confuse him as part of a centuries long game they played against each other. Un-amused, Doom abandoned Margaretta, and left her and her creation to the temporal destruction caused by their frantic time-shifting. The island fortress then disappeared into itself, killing both inhabitants.
Doom then began a plot to become the President of the United States, a position that had atrophied since the corporations came to power, but still retained its original powers. He started by inciting riots in Makhelastan to destabilize the American corporation, Angel’s Breath. Then, when his part-time ally Poet was killed in a fight with drug dealers, Doom used his funeral to make new connections with infobrokers and datapirates. His next step was to build an organized strike force of netgliders called the Cyberdive Cadre, headed by the expert netglider, Indigo Eshun. She, in turn, helped to rebuild Doom’s gypsy hacker, Wire, who was previously killed by Margaretta, into a being that lived half in cyberspace with his lover, Paloma, and half in the real world, giving Doom a constant, physical link to the Cyberdive Cadre. Using his diplomatic pull with Wakanda, Doom also hired their crack troop squad, the Panther’s Rage, as well as their commander, Nkrumah. Along with the mutant, Morphine Somers, and the mercenary, Sharp Blue, Doom was ready to invade America.
He first sent the Cyberdive Cadre to tie up America’s communications. Then, Doom personally invaded the country using the floating city Valhalla, now named Libera Cielo (Clear Sky in Latverian), and destroyed both the Angel Breath headquarters and the Senate, killing everyone inside. Next, Nkrumah’s troops attacked the White House honor guards, the American Captains, and Doom himself broke into the White House and forced the former President to commit suicide instead of being killed.
Doom’s first act as President was to create his Black Cabinet. This consisted of Indigo Eshun as his Minister of Signal, Nkrumah as his Minister of Enemy Relations, Morphine Somers as his Minister for Humanity, and Sharp Blue as the Minister of Order. He also dissolved the Public Eye and other security forces, and rebuilt them as a new incarnation of S.H.I.E.L.D., with Jake Gallows, the former Punisher, as the head and Doom’s Minister of Punishment. Additionally, Doom hired 2099’s Ghost Rider as his Federal Marshall to keep order in Transverse City.
He continued to make changes, putting cyberspace-connected Dive Booths in every city. Then he created a national corporation called Cynex, and arrested the heads of the previous corporations, downgraded the credit levels of all citizens from the unlimited Black Cards to Gold Cards, and forced the corporation CEOs to choose one amongst them to be killed. They unanimously chose Avatarr, and when Doom attempted to kill him off-handedly, Avatarr revealed himself as a powerful alien with hallucinogens for blood. Doom eventually killed him, but not before he was affected by the hallucinogens, and recorded a public broadcast where he threatened the American populace for allowing Avatarr to pass unknown amongst them.
Using Doom’s resulting damaged reputation as a lever, Anthony Herod, the head of the Chicago Reserve, a secret vault full of outlawed technology, created a puppet version of Captain America and started his own attack upon the Presidency of America. Herod sent Wave Spiders, genetically-engineered, living weapons, against Doom’s cabinet, sending Nkrumah back to Wakanda, forcing Sharp Blue to flee to Mexico, and killing Indigo Shun. The Wave Spiders then destroyed Doom’s Libera Cielo and traveled to Latveria where they bombed the populace using necrotoxins, which reduced all living matter to a protein-rich sludge. Next, Herod destroyed the White House and rebuilt it using nanotech robots as the Red House, putting Captain America in the President’s seat as a false leader.
Herod also attacked Doom, who abandoned Washington D.C. and saved a young mutant named Annie Wagner from Shield troopers, then retreated to the mutant haven, Halo City. Doom used the resources of the city, which he created, to again rebuild his armor. He also attacked the leader of Halo City, Morphine Somers, whom he had put in place, and threatened him to use his power properly, or he would come for him. Doom left Halo City and headed to Washington D.C. Back at the capital, Doom used nanotech robots to take apart the Red House, along with everyone inside, including the fake Captain America, then used the same robots to eat away at Herod, sentencing him to a life of constant pain. Then, after putting Shakti Haddad in charge of the young mutant team, X-Nation, Doom used a hidden teleporter to travel back to Latveria to rebuild his home nation.
Armed with a plan to repair the problems of the world by making small changes to every nation, Doom plugged himself into the dataweb to start his worldwide machinations. But his plan backfired, and his consciousness expanded to the point where he felt the deaths of every one of his subjects from the necrotoxin, and he was forced to unplug to save his mind from the emotional pain. He then decided to travel into the past to find a way to save his people before they were attacked, and to that end he found himself again in the late 20th Century. Doom discovered a species of crab which secreted an addictive substance being used by drug dealers, which he found could make a populace all but immune the effects of necrotoxin over time, so against his principles, he decided to addict all of Latveria in the late 1900s in order to save them in the future. Though the Fantastic Four, Namor, Daredevil, and the younger incarnation of Doctor Doom distrusted his intentions and fought with him to stop his plans. Eventually, Doom was able to analyze the chemical and store the information in his armor’s mask before returning to the future.
Back in 2099, Doom found the remains of the Latverian people being led by Fortune and her brother, Kazmierz Rosikon, previously repaired by Margaretta while she was alive. Few of the populace had survived, and many that had were mutated into beings Kaz called mutalocos. Despite their lack of gratefulness, the Latverians again banded together with Doom when a massive planetoid arrived to orbit Earth, destroying the planet’s environment and endangering the entire populace due to its gravitational pull. A man claiming to be the original Reed Richards, transported from the 20th Century, implored Doom to help against the Atlanteans and their leader Attuma, who had used the surface world’s confusion to invade. Doom agreed and helped forced back the Atlanteans, saving the populace of New York and the surrounding areas long enough for them to escape to the Savage Land to rebuild.
Doom also fought back an attempted invasion on Latverian soil from the Atlanteans, and taunted Attuma with death or self-destruction. Then, responding to a summons from Fortune, Doom found Wire, who had previously committed suicide when the woman he loved was killed in Doom’s American bid for power, had been reassembled from cyberspace by the Collective. Doom accepted Wire’s invitation to meet with the Collective’s emissary and found himself transported elsewhere. The Collective threatened Doom, telling him that they were going to assimilate all of Earth and needed him to help him find the scouts that they implanted on their last visit, but before they could force him to comply, Kaz appeared, dressed in Radian’s armor. Kaz claimed he was sent by the Y’Lestja and pronounced himself the protector of planet Earth. Despite this, Doom still offered to make an exchange and give the Collective one of their scouts in exchange for the restoration of his beloved Latveria.
